China's Flood Battle A `Fight To The Death'

BEIJING — As torrential floodwaters fed by China's seasonal rains surge down the swollen Yangtze River, major dike failures are being reported and heavy casualties are feared.

According to the official New China news agency, the Yangtze is threatening to burst its banks in 3,200 places and 1,800 of the possible breaches could be "major."

Tens of millions of people live along the banks of the river, which is so heavily laden with silt that in places its level is higher than that of the villages and towns it passes through. Hundreds of thousands of homes have been destroyed and tens of thousands of acres of crops submerged beneath water as high as 95 feet.

The Yangtze, the world's third-longest river, stretches 3,900 miles from the mountains of Qinghai in the far west to the coastal port of Shanghai in the east. The flooding has been concentrated along the last 1,000 miles or so.

Since the middle of June, millions of people have been battling the worst floods along the mighty river since 1954, when 30,000 died. With more rain forecast and the waters still rising, there are fears the casualty toll could increase from the 1,268 officially reported by the Civil Affairs Ministry.

Water levels at some points have surpassed records set in 1954, and this year's flood season is the longest on record. Compounding the crisis, a typhoon was headed for the coast, threatening even more devastation.

A Hong Kong-based human-rights group said 150 soldiers and hundreds of villagers were swept away when a dike collapsed in Jiayu County in the central province of Hubei. The Information Center of Human Rights and Democratic Movement in China said that as many as 1,000 villagers still are missing since the dike burst Saturday evening, sending a wall of water surging into villages and fields.

A Jiayu County official told the Reuters news agency that the area was "very seriously stricken" and that the floods were threatening a "majority of lives" there. The reports could not be confirmed.

China's state-controlled newspapers do not mention casualty figures, and their reports of the flooding have tended to focus on the efforts of the estimated 1 million soldiers from the People's Liberation Army who have been deployed to the flood areas to help shore up the dikes.

But a note of alarm appeared to be creeping into some of the official media reports. The China Youth Daily reported that dikes were breached in at least two counties and a city in Hubei province "causing huge loss of life and property."

The Yangcheng Evening News said 400 soldiers were swept away when a levee that had been protecting 56,000 people in two towns collapsed. Nearly 20,000 people had to be rescued, the newspaper said.

The New China agency reported that authorities in Hubei had deliberately allowed 11 small dikes to collapse to help protect the city of Wuhan. Damages from the resulting flooding were estimated at $48 million, it said.

In the Hunan province town of Anxiang, 100,000 people lost their homes when a levee burst July 24, New China reported.

Most of the residents were evacuated in time, but thousands who weren't are stranded on top of a dike, waiting for the floodwaters to recede, the agency said.

Another flood peak, the fourth since June, was reported to be forming upriver after torrential rain over the weekend in the Sichuan town of Chongqing.

In Nanjing, 250 miles west of Shanghai, the local military command exhorted troops to "fight to the death" to protect the town from flooding.

The alarm also was sounded along the Yellow River, where 2.5 million residents have been put on alert to fight floods after heavy rain along stretches of China's second-longest river.